Singularity: The expected moment in history when the amplification of human intelligence begins to accelerate exponentially by the application of advanced technologies to augment the brain. –Raymond Kurzweil
All is lightness & bright;
While the forces of nature
Show us the height
Of the Universe’s favor.
fortnight = 14 days; stone = 14 pounds
Doomed to do it again & again, no choice but to play a Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall.
Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome: ground to dust; plowed with salt.
Spain, France, Britain, America – burned into the oblivion of centuries.
–A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
In a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only a brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, and finally Extreme Unction.
And a moment of blackness at the end – or at the beginning, rather.
For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. It would be hard to believe differently.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter Miller
What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
Thought: concept, cogitation, consideration, deliberation, estimation, idea, imagination, reflection, consideration, speculation, supposition.
Think: ponder; muse; cogitate, deliberate, esteem, imagine, reason, reflect, seriously consider; speculate, suppose.
There are depths in man that go the length of lowest Hell, as there are heights that reach highest Heaven – for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, made by him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery as he is?
-Thomas Carlyle
What society thinks of as reality today is the hypnosis of social conditioning, an induced fiction in which we are all collectively participating.
It is the melodrama of existence, filled with obsessions & pursuits, wherein our only fate is to be born and grow old.
–Deepak Chopra
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS